Travel reports Maastricht
Autumn 2022
Maastricht was a fantastic city with many possibilities to be active both in student life and in the classroom. They have a very specific learning style where you are intended to be in class and teaching each other among the students, presenting the literature between students, making the learning more interactive and teacher led than in Swedish universities.
Going here is a fantastic way to meet new people, but I would recommend going to the Erasmus networks intro week, meaning that you have to be there a little before (a week or two) the semester starts.
It was somewhat difficult to make friends within your classroom since most people on a bachelor and master context already have their social context, which made Erasmus very important for an exchange students’ social life in Maastricht.
I gained housing via Maastrichthousing.com and lived in a corridor of 12 people. In any corridor what makes it or breaks it is the people you live with, but I did not have any issues and had a wonderful gang of corridor mates.
Since the city is close to the border of both Belgium and Germany it was very easy to travel while living in Maastricht. The trains are easy to navigate, and Amsterdam is only a few hours away, perfect for either a daytrip or a full weekend.
Something less exciting and more heartbreaking was the university’s actions towards students’ safety. The dorm I lived in was fantastic, but during an outing a friend of a friend got sexually assaulted by another student in the dorms, and neither the university or the housing company did anything to reprimand the student even though there was clear evidence that the student had committed the act of filming someone during sex without their permission.
Maastricht is a fantastic place, but it felt sad that someone got traumatized and the university’s solution was to put the victim and the perpetrator in the same room so they could “talk it out”.
If you are interested in reading more travel reports, contact outgoing@fek.uu.se